


Of Monsters And

by CloudDreamer



Series: Demon Eyes [13]
Category: Dr Carmilla (Musician), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Dr Carmilla's A+ Parenting, Eye Trauma, Feral Behavior, Forbidden Lore, Implied/Referenced Suicide, It's probably not something as scientifically simple as blood, Loss of Control, Starvation, Vampires, What does Carmilla actually feed on anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:28:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23567614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: Carmilla will never understand how much is her and how much is the curse, and if there is a distinction at all. It never gets easier.
Relationships: Dr Carmilla & Nastya Rasputina, Dr Carmilla & The Mechanisms
Series: Demon Eyes [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1698556
Comments: 8
Kudos: 25
Collections: Stowaways' Shenanigans





	Of Monsters And

**Author's Note:**

> TW for eating disorder adjacent thought patterns and self harm.

Carmilla doesn’t plan to lose control. She never plans to, but it’s a matter of eternity. It’s inevitable she’ll spend just a little bit too long absorbed in some experiment, too long between planets where she can find some fresh monster to open up, someone whose sins she’s tallied, who she can justify the guilt away. Not that she doesn’t feel the guilt anyway, but billions of years of existence dulls the pain. Somewhat. 

She knows the signs of her hunger. She knows the shape of her impulses, the biological reasons how and why that hunger strips her of her autonomy, of her mind. She knows what gnaws at the chains her conscious mind forces around it. Carmilla’s intelligence is almost never truly gone when she’s starved, but the instinct is as old and strong as the day she first died and came back while her mind’s scarred and exhausted. It takes more — so much more— to drag her back up that ledge than it does to fall off it. 

She’s been the ancient evil, buried beneath layers of concrete, and she’s felt her sanity slipping away, to the point where she’d rather burry herself deeper than escape that hell. There’s nothing that can stop her, when she’s that far gone. Nobody can hold her back. She doesn’t recognize faces, not until she comes to, standing over someone she loves, face covered in viscera and horror in their eyes, if they still have eyes. If she hasn’t clawed them out, felt the fluids and blood mix soak down her fingers. If she hasn’t run her tongue across that delicate membrane, pleasure she never wanted overcoming her as her mind returns.

She’s the inspiration behind a million stories to terrify small children. Don’t go out into the woods. The Doctor will get you. They don’t tell their kids what really happens when she gets someone, though, because they don’t want to scare them too bad. Don’t wanna give them nightmares. She has her own nightmares, but sometimes, when she wakes up, she realizes they were real. She wakes up over Nastya once, bitter taste in her mouth and tears in her eyes, and she knows she’s broken their tentative trust beyond repair. She know she’s torn away 

Except saying wakes up implies she’s ever entirely gone, that she doesn’t feel the flesh tear beneath her fingers or that she can’t ever pull back. Those few times she manages makes the times she doesn’t so much worse. Each time, she feels the guilt rise up in her chest, as brutal as the hunger she wants to feed. The line between the her Carmilla would burry herself alive if it meant never letting it consume her, but, god, she’s tried and it’s only made it worse. She’s seen her Mechanisms try to break what she’d given them. He’d shock himself to stop his own heart, she’d drag knives across her skin to expose the blood she’d once feared, and they’d burn everything they could get a hand on, just to feel the heat and suck in the smoke that’d once comforted them, once killed them, and now did nothing at all. 

She likes to think she’s given up, but when she feels the edges of her feral instincts rise up beneath her skin, her claws go straight to her own flesh, her fangs tear up her own lips almost as fast as they can heal, but not quite. It’s the last control she has. If she’s fallen far enough to feel the heat, then it’s usually too late. There are other ways to feed, ways that don’t leave such devastation in her wake, but it’s never easy. It doesn’t count if it doesn’t hurt. 

Carmilla would never tell them, but she’s jealous of her Mechanisms at times. They might be monsters too, but they’re free. They don’t feel the weight of their sins in the same way. Their violence is always a choice, one she gave them at every opportunity. It never overcomes them. At the end of day, they hurt people because they want to. Because when their nightmares get the better of them, killing makes them feel in control.

Even when she choses to kill, outside her curse’s constraints, she never feels in control. It’s always the result of an ultimatum, the lesser of two evils. Carmilla knows from the outside, she looks exactly the same as them. When her bloodlust is sated, her body floods her with a chemical cocktail she can name and explain all she wants, it feels like pure sadistic joy. 

She can’t sing when her violence consumes her. She can barely make out the beginning syllables of “I’m sorry” or “run.” She knows she was born to create, to fix, to learn, but this death of hers curses her to do nothing but break. Carmilla listens from a distance to her Mechanisms’s songs, the ones they write without her, and she smiles a sad smile. They might be freer than her, but they still can’t imagine a proper happy ending for shit. 

For them, the deaths are the happy endings. Lives cut short but lives cut short surrounded by the people they love, having accomplished something for the ages. She’s walked in the aftermath of their songs, waded through the sometimes literal rivers of blood, and she knows they romanticize the endings. In real life, people don’t get to cradle their beloved as they softly weep. There’s always somewhere else to run to, someone new to run away from. 

Not that she can do much better. She doesn’t hold their soft endings against them. She knows out there, there are people who don’t have to chose between languishing in misery and rounding off the edges of tragedy to let people die in ignorance. But she doubts any of those people have lived as long as they have.


End file.
